 Madam President Runte, Dean Plurge, Elder Shanks, Board Chairman Jackson, Dr. Schwartz, Dr. Wright. I knew Dr. Wright's father, who was also called Dr. Wright. He was a medical doctor. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, I have long admired Carlin University and a great number of my colleagues in the Foreign Service have attended this university. And it is a great honor indeed to be given a honorary doctorate. And I thank you also for inviting me to deliver this year's Catherine A. Graham's lecture. It is an honor and a privilege to be here. The topic I picked was Aboriginal Canadians, the struggle to be seen as human. I want to start off by telling you about a trip I made soon after I became Lieutenant Governor back in, I guess it was probably in 2003. Lieutenant Governors are responsible for a number of things. Constitutionally, they're all spelled out. But also, they're responsible and encouraged to make community visits. And a Ontario government aircraft is put at their disposition to make these visits, a twin-engined turbojet, King Air. And I decided that I would like to visit native communities in the vast north of Ontario, the area which is about two-thirds of the size of the province, much of which there are no roads and which is occupied and inhabited since the last Ice Age by native people, the Cree along the James Bay lowland, the OJ Cree a little to the south, and the Ojibwe farther south. In that area, there are 26 communities which have no access to the outside by road except since 1987 by ice roads in the winter. And they are the area of the greatest poverty and greatest hardship of all the First Nation communities in Ontario. I had visited often the Rama Reserve. I'm a member of the Chippewas of Rama First Nation back in the 40s and 50s. And it was a rural slum. The paved road stopped at the entrance to the reserve and picked up again on the other side. There was no garbage collection, so garbage was scattered around. There were dead dogs and cats on the side of the road. There had been electricity at one stage, but no one could afford it anymore. So people used cola lamps. It was a place where in Rama, when you see people walking down the streets, their heads were bowed and they looked defeated. What I had noticed over the years, though, as I went back, was the great change in Rama and also in other First Nation communities in southern Ontario that I had occasioned to see. And I thought that perhaps I would see circumstances or conditions somewhat similar. My aircraft circled the airport at Kasseshwan. And down below, I could see a large crowd of people. There was an aircraft taxiing to take off. And when I landed and asked the chief what was going on, he told me that a 13-year-old girl had killed herself and that they were flying her body out to Timmins for an autopsy. And everyone was there to say goodbye. And I asked him, you know, why? Why had she done that? And he looked at me as if I was really naive. And he said, well, she had no hope. Not too long afterwards, the Grand Chief, Grand Chief Stan Beardy, who became a very good friend of mine, who was Grand Chief of the Nishinabayaske Nation, 49 communities in the north, called me to say that three kids had killed themselves at Wanaman Lake First Nation, which is an OJ community, farther south in a flying community, as was Kasseshwan, a flying community. He said that he knew I was a member of the Chippewa Azarama First Nation, and we had met. And he said he wanted me to come with him to express our sorrow to the community. He said nobody ever does that. It's very important for me, he said, as Grand Chief, that we try to show the people that the outside world cares. And so I picked them up in Thunder Bay and we went on to Wanaman Lake. And there I discovered that the three kids had been in a suicide pact, and one of them had hanged herself on a tree limb right beside the school. And more disturbing from the point of view of the Grand Chief and the other people in the community was that when the first person died, the first kid died, that person appeared, the spirit of that person appeared to the other two who were part of the pact, saying, I have killed myself. We agreed that all three of us would kill ourselves. Nobody has ever kept their word with us, and you have to keep your word. So the second person died. And then the two spirits went to the third one, and that person died. And I discovered that that was a fairly common thing. And the communities got very upset and worried when they heard about a visitation like that, because dreams are very powerful for everybody, but very powerful also in the worldview of Native people, especially in the North. And I asked the same question. Why did the kids do it? Same answer, because they had no hope. Then I went to Mishko Kogemang First Nation, which is an Ojibwe community, still part of the Nan area, south of Pekka Lake. It was not a flying community, so the OPP drove me into the community. And as I went in, what I saw were fresh graves, lots of graves, with fishing lines and dolls and baseball hats. Drove by new houses with the windows smashed out and the insulation torn out of the walls and thrown outside and all the furniture outside. And when I called on the chief, I asked him what was going on. Why so many graves? Why so much vandalism? He said that the kids hated themselves. They hated their parents. They hated the community. But most of all, they hated themselves and they were self-destructive. That's why they trashed the houses. And that's why they were killing themselves in such great numbers. And it was the same reason. He said they had nobody has any hope around here. I had lunch with Archbishop Desmond Tutu some time before. And he told me about a trip he made to Canada to thank the Canadian government for everything it had done internationally to fight apartheid. So he came in 1990 to thank Mr. Mulroney and the government and the Canadian people for all that it had done in the battle to make South Africa an independent state with political justice. But he told me that although he, of course, did not say anything when he was in Canada, he felt really heart sick. He couldn't understand how Canada could tolerate conditions in Mishko Gagemang. He said they were worse than anything in any black township in South Africa. And yet here we were leading the fight in against apartheid. He just couldn't reconcile how we would behave one way abroad and another way in Canada. And that's when I discovered that, in fact, there had been an epidemic of youth suicide going on in the territory of the Nant territory. It started in 1987, shortly after the winter roads came in. And every year about 25 kids would kill themselves. Sometimes they would be concentrated in several communities and they would stop and they'd go somewhere else and then they'd break out again, but constantly, year after year. And the communities would close down. There would be tremendous grief. Everybody would get together, be him singing. There would be poems written by normally the person killing themselves would write a poem about the hopelessness of life and that would be read out, community would grieve, and then it would just carry on, year after year after year. And so I asked myself two existential questions. Why do these kids have no hope? And why is their feeling of hopelessness so great that they're prepared to kill themselves when they reach puberty? And just as important, why doesn't anybody in the outside world care about it? After all, these suicides had been going on since 1987 and nothing was being done. Nothing was being done to address which some obvious causes for these children to have no hope, such as providing native kids with a level of funding for their schooling that non-native kids receive. On reserve, native kids receive between 50% and 80% of what non-native kids get. And so right from the start, they can't have libraries. They can't have sports facilities or equipment. There's no special ed teachers. When the teachers arrive, many of them just flee at the earliest opportunity. And so why didn't anyone care? And I continued to ask myself questions, two existential ones. Why no hope? Why doesn't anyone care? The broader question I asked myself was, why doesn't anybody care about the condition of native people, especially the native people in the North? Northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, everywhere in the North were the majority of native people there. Why don't they care about their condition? After all, the suicide rates for all native people are much higher than those for the non-native population. At least five times as high. And 20% of the prisoners in jails are native people, indicating their feelings of self-destruction and hopelessness. Why don't the police pay attention when 600 women, native women, disappeared? Why wasn't any of the 20-plus Auditor General reports appealing to the government, by the Xrilla Fraser, to do something about a whole series of issues, whether it's education or water conditions or whatever. They were just shelved. Why were they ignored by the government? Why didn't members of parliament pay any attention to them? Why has there been no outpouring of protest against the fact that native children who are the most disadvantaged in the country to start with receive so little compared to white kids or non-native kids for their education? Why is native welfare so underfunded and yet there is a crisis in native families? Why are the physically and mentally disabled just left at home to rot in these places? And the list goes on. So I ask myself all these questions. And in my view, the answers are because there's been 200 years of dehumanization of native people going on in this country, starting in 1813. More specifically, I could put the date October 5, 1813, which will be 200 years next week, when Tecumseh and the Shawnees were defeated at the Battle of Thames. And I'll come back to that. But relations weren't always that way. There were 200 years before October 2013 in since contact between native and non-native people. And it was a partnership in many respects. Maybe this is what John Ralston Saul talks about when he talks about native people being what the third founding nation. I disagree with him because I don't think the country was really founded until after the arrival of the settlers. What happened for the first 200 years was a prelude. It was a battle between, to a great extent, competition between great powers from Europe, starting off also with the arrival of the dispatch of Jesuits to Canada, what would become Canada, to save the souls of the native people, particularly the Herons. And you needed live bodies to save their souls. And so they weren't coming to Canada to eliminate the native people. It was a partnership between French Cour de Bois, fur traders, and native people who had the furs, which led to over, as it evolved over a number of years, intermarriage and partnerships between French and then later on, Scottish fur traders and native women. And today, according to the 2006 census, there are 400,000 Métis people in Canada. So they was some sort of partnership going on. Very important as well was the partnership in wars, the French and the British needed native allies and fought their wars over a 150-year period, 200-year period, relying upon native allies. And the relationship was one of, I would say, respect. I would not go so far as to say that people were accepted native people as equals, except those who married them, and except in the Métis community. But then the War of 1812 occurred, and that was the big turning point. In the first year of the war, the British were completely incapable of fighting off the Americans. They had only one sort of broken-down regiment in Upper Canada dispersed around the province. And the Americans had over 70,000 members of their militia, members in the American militia, plus 5,000 regular soldiers. And they thought they could just walk into Canada. But the British had these ties that they had cultivated with the native people over the years, not just in what became Canada, but in the Ohio Valley, the Shawnees. And in that first year of the war, it was the native people. It was the First Nations, what we call First Nations today, the Indian warriors, and the Métis who took Fort Michelin Mackenac in the north, and that blocked the access of the Americans from the north. And it was the Shawnees supported by Ojibwe and other people who forced the surrender of Fort Detroit, blocking off access of the Americans to the west. And it was the Mohawks' warriors from Six Nations who intervened after the death of General Brock on Queenston Heights and rallied the Canadian militia and the few British troops that were there to chase the Americans off the Queenston Heights. And then the fighting season was over. Upper Canada had been saved. And that's when the end of Native influence began, because the British sent in their troops. They were the ones relied upon and the native people were on the losing side at the Battle of York. And then on October 5, 1813, the Battle of the Thames occurred. The Comsy was killed. And after that, with some sporadic cases where the native warriors played a decisive role, it was British pretty well all the way. And after that, it was all downhill. Because it was the arrival, the upper Canada was changed by the arrival of settlers. And the settlers wanted land. They didn't want to intermarry with them like the court of war. They didn't want them as warriors. They had the British to protect them. They wanted their land. And the native people occupied that land. And so I would say that what happened over the next 200 years was sort of several things going on at the same time. One, the ancestral lands that the native people were taken from them. And they were relegated to small reserves. And in Muskoka, for example, the only place where there was a permanent native settlement was in what is now the village of Port Carlin. And very few people are aware that that is the case. And when the Canadian government opened up the area to settlement, it just kicked the people out. They had farms. They were refrigerators. They wanted to stay. And their chief, chief Pegamemigal, Pegamemigal sent an appeal to the governor general, asking if they could stay. Father, this place is beautiful in our eyes. And we found we could not leave it. Many winters have passed since we settled here and began to cultivate our gardens. We have good houses and large gardens and where we raise much corn and potatoes. We live by hunting and the taking of furs and our hunting grounds are close to here. We hope you will grant the wish of your red children and do it soon because the whites are coming in close to us and we are afraid that your surveyors will soon lay out our lands into lots. But it was ignored. I say that to say that native people have never forgotten, still suffer, I believe, from the loss of their lands. In terms of suffering, the next big thing was the institution of the residential school system. You are all aware of the facts. I'm not going to repeat them here. But I would like to try and explain the depth of grief that occurred as a result of the residential school system. 150,000 children removed over a 100-year period. The children at the age of six removed from their families and starting in the early 20th century force being used to take the kids from their parents. It must have been terrible in these native communities to live in a native community where there are no children. September would come, the kids would be taken away and it would just be desolation. And this went on year after year, decade after decade. Children were taken away to be brainwashed, to be turned into brown-skinned white people. And they were also taken away when they were in these schools and experiments were conducted on them to see nutritional experiments. There were their caregivers who were people who were men of substance, priests, United Church, Methodist ministers, Presbyterian ministers, schoolteachers. And they abused their authority. They raped and beat the kids. And the kids would come home completely broken in spirit and not knowing how to raise their children. And so generation after generation went by each time, family structure becoming weaker and weaker. So you reach the situation of the native kids of Northern Ontario whose parents and grandparents didn't know how to raise them. They raised them the same way they had been raised, which was to show them no affection in many cases. And so they couldn't turn to their parents for help. And so I spoke to many survivors of residential schools. And I wrote a book about it. It's fiction based on fact. The three women in particular who went to the St. Anne's residential school in Fort Albany. They told me their stories. And I pulled them together as a protagonist of my book as long as the rivers flow, which is now being adopted by a growing number of universities for their teacher's courses and others in high schools. And I'd like to read you the part when Martha comes back from the school after being away for 10 years and she is rejected by her mother and she is depressed. But Martha's condition worsened. And soon she was unable to sleep. Matters reached a crisis one night when she was, as usual, lying awake and rigid in bed. Her senses on high alert. A cold moonlight flooded in through the open window, casting sinister shadows against the walls. And the normal sounds of the northern community assumed a menacing air. Children running and playing behind her house were making fun of her. The hood of an owl was a premonition of death. And the distant howling of wolves was a direct threat. The dogs responsible for protecting their human masters from wild animals answered them from backyards throughout the reserve with irresolute and fearful barking as if to say, if it's Martha you want, just come and get her. We won't stop you. The wind in the black spruce trees whispered that she came from bad seed from a flawed inferior race doomed to disappear and leave no mark on history. It said that nuns had been right. She and her people were stone age accidents of history who had been clothed in the skins of animals when the white man arrived with no alphabet, no books, no music, no calendar, no domestic animals, no cities and no monuments, all the things that she had been told and learned in school. It said the native gods were inferior to white gods. It had been vanquished and would never return leaving nature empty and forlorn. It said that she was weak, friendless and unwelcome in her mother's house, in her community and in her country. It said she came from a place that no longer existed, was living a life that had no purpose, and ultimately she and her people would disappear from history without a trace. This unfortunately is the attitude or the feelings of so many people, not just women, but men also who were abused in these schools. I attended a healing circle of parents whose children had killed themselves because the native people in Northern Ontario, they recognized the problem and they attempt to deal with the issue of broken families by gathering six or seven or 800 people together under big tents and have family counselors nearby and have people come and talk about their experiences and how they coped and to try and make up for 100 years of being adrift. And in that context, they would have healing circles where there would be a gathering in the native tradition and a talking stick would be held by one person and as that person talked, nobody, or as long as that person held that talking stick, no one could interrupt, even if the person just sat there and cried. And so Rebecca, I'm going to read this. It's a little hard to hear, I guess. It's hard to write, that's for sure. Rebecca is an amalgam of three children at the healing circle. The mother of Rebecca, the first of the three children to die, because I went back to what really happened in Wanuman Lake that I talked about earlier. The mother of Rebecca, the first of the three children to die, embraced the talking stick and said nothing as tears rolled down her cheeks. She twisted her hands and shifted her weight from one side of her seat to the other and she did not break her silence. Finally, in a small, lisping voice, she started to speak, holding her hand in front of her mouth. I feel so bad. She was so young, our only child. Who would have thought it? I've not spoken of my pain before. It was too hard. The mother sobbed openly, abject and animal-like in her misery and leaned her head on her husband's shoulder. He too began to cry and held her tightly. I was the one who found her, she said, straightening up and no longer attempting to hide the gap in her mouth. I had been drinking and me and my husband were fighting. Don't even remember what it was about. He'd slug me in the mouth, knocking out most of my front teeth and opening my lip. He hit me again, giving me a black eye. I went out and got a piece of firewood and gave him a taste of his own medicine. I guess we were both pretty drunk. Rebecca came in yelling for us to stop. She was crying like crazy and saying she couldn't live like that no more. She decided to kill herself, she said. It was a cry for help but I didn't believe her. She had said the same thing before but had done nothing. She'd always been a handful and I thought she was just acting up. I laughed at her and told her that she had it easy compared to the old days when we lived on the land when it was a life and death struggle to survive. I told her the government gave us everything. The government would give her everything. So what was her problem? I turned her away. She was hanging by a wire from a closed hook in the closet. I blame myself and feel bad. I should have listened to her and told her I loved her. So I prefer to read literature than just tell you what happened. But that is the grief and the pain of the native people. The loss of their lands. The children being taken away from them. At the same time as the native people were suffering there was a growing gap. How am I doing for time? The same time as the native people were suffering and continued to suffer there was a growing gap from what I can see in the attitudes of non-native people toward native people that always I guess been a certain amount of stereotyping but it seemed to have increased. And it was the basis to a great extent I think of the reason that people of goodwill, so-called goodwill in the non-native community tolerated the abuse of native children. Duncan Campbell Scott was the great sensitive poet of confederation who wrote all these wonderful poems. And he studied in universities as somebody worthwhile. He was the person though who was in Indian Affairs for 50 years. He's the one who was responsible for passing the legislation or regulations, authorizing the police to take native children from their families. He was the one who put into effect the plan to put native people in jail who followed their cultural practices. And he wrote terrible poems about native people that people applauded because they believed it. Here's one called the Onondaga Madonna. She stands full-throated and with careless pose this woman of a weird and waning race, the tragic savage lurking in her face where all her pagan passion burns and glows, her blood is mingled with her ancient foes and thrills with war and wildness in her veins, her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains of feuds and forays and her father's woes and closer in the shawl a butter breast, paler than she, her baby clings and lies, the latest promise of her nation's doom, the primal warrior gleaming from his eyes. He sulks and burdened with his infant gloom. He draws his heavy brows and will not rest. The stereotype of the native savage, the continuation of the myth that native people are doomed to disappear. And this, I believe, led this stereotyping which goes on to this day. And I'd like to talk, just mention to you something about stereotyping. I was invited by a group of people in Thunder Bay to address the community of Thunder Bay on the issue of the day in March which commemorates the United Nations Day to fight discrimination around the world. And there were about 200 people there and they were fine people. No criticism. And we talked and then in question period the first person who came to the microphone was a native person and he said that he was a high school teacher and he had gone to university. He had studied hard. He was a professional but when he walked through the mall in Thunder Bay he was just another drunken Indian and then others came up to say the same thing. Drug and alcohol counselors, business people. But a dozen came up all bringing the same heartfelt message that people looked right through them. They just saw an image of drunken Indians. And I think that Ralph Ellison, the great black American writer, got it right in his book The Invisible Man published in 1952. I am an invisible man. This is the condition that this black writer said reflected the status of African Americans in that era before the civil rights period but this applies to a great extent to Canada even today, maybe more so today. I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe. I am a man of substance, a flesh and bone, fiber and liquids and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible understand simply because people refuse to see me like the bottle-less heads you see sometimes in circuses, in circus psychos. It is though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass, when they approach me they see only my surroundings themselves or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come into contact. A matter of construction of the inner eyes upon reality. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom on other people's minds. Say a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his might to destroy. I wanted to stay on this issue of the other for a minute because I think this is the key to understanding the attitudes of non-native people toward native people. We're at a university, I'm sure the room is filled with people who are familiar with the concept of the other. It's when people consider that others from different lands are not as fully human to some extent as they are. Certainly people they don't understand leads to discrimination and acts of hatred. Today we live in an era of great migrations of people going from the third world to the first world fleeing civil wars and starvation. They are coming in great numbers to Europe, Canada, the United States. In Europe it's led to the people in the old established communities to take action, to try to shun them, to not accept them as citizens even if they become citizens. It has led to riots, big major riots in places like France where there is the Maghrebian population is looked down upon. Even in Sweden the population doesn't want to accept them. In Belgium the United States resistance to the rival of Mexicans in Canada because of our policy of multiculturalism the other is while still people different and subject to a lot of discrimination have a better life except in perhaps in Quebec where the other are looked upon to some extent as the Europeans look upon migrants coming in search of a different land. But aboriginal people except are in a different category. I would say they're the other, other. There seems to be something about the fact that aboriginal people are first nations, are first peoples. There is a mystique about them that they were here with the, they were here from the dawn of time and that when the people from the developed countries come they are getting a glimpse into what it was like back in the period when dinosaurs roamed the earth or something. And there is suspicion and there is a certain sense I guess mixed with a sense of fear. And they do not accept, they put aboriginal people in a different category than they put other new Canadians. In a sense multiculturalism doesn't really include native people in Canada. My experience as a diplomat my first posting was Columbia and 1968 to 70. And a friend of mine who was an anthropologist was doing his PhD at Cambridge, Bernard Arcon, he came to see me to tell me about the people he was studying, the Quiva Indians in the Mata River which flows into the Orinoco which goes into the Atlantic. And he said that on the weekends the local settlers, they called them colonies there as sport would go hunting Quivas just for the fun of it. And the police did nothing. So when a British TV crew came by I took the director down and introduced him to Bernard and I saw first hand what was the condition of people who were wounded and what all because he was living with a group that had been recovering from their wounds and the British team came back and did a documentary that had no impact whatsoever because the colonies didn't care. Indians were just another sort of animal to some extent for them to be killed at will. And when I was high commissioner in Australia I remember having lunch with a lady who had been, who was the daughter of an aborigine mother and a white father who was in accordance with Australian government policy because this happened 40 years ago. She was removed at the age of three months or something from her mother never to see her again because that was the Australian policy. It was to try and breed out the aborigine in the people because they didn't really believe the aborigines were as fully human as they were. Alan Patton, the great writer, Australian writer put in one of his novels, it was actually a book of non-fiction, that he thought that the aborigines weren't fully human that they didn't have the same amount of, the same genetic code. And so this woman was crying. She had been trying all these years to find her mother, but she never had. And so that unspeakable sentiment colors the dialogue and is reinforced to some extent by the fact that over the years consistently, whenever there's an Ipsilis Reid poll on who is discriminated against the most, the winners are always aboriginal people. They're looked down upon more than any other group followed by Arab Muslims, followed by black Canadians. But the champions and the hate list are aboriginal people. And that means that on all those things I was talking to you about, all those horrible inequities, especially this schooling of children, which in a sense is like the American south before the civil rights movement when they had separate but equal, but they weren't equal schools. That there is no pressure put on governments to do anything, no pressure on governments to be just, no outrage at the suicide of kids, no mass support for the idle no more movement. In the United States, you had a sort in the civil rights movement, you had an alliance of black people and liberal white Americans from the northeast who worked together on the freedom rights and worked together to desegregate the south. But there's nobody stepping out to help the native people. They're all by themselves. A few people will come out, but there's no sense of urgency on the part of mainstream society to do anything for native people. And that is why governments, whether they're liberal or conservative, do nothing or do very little and get away with it. And so I was concerned because I'd come from a First Nation background. David mentioned that we were a, that we came from humble background. He didn't mention that our first home was a tent up by the village dump. But I learned to read at an early age and that was my ticket out of a life of poverty. It was also access to the world of imagination to think of existence as different from the one I found myself in. I also got along well, found them after initial period of racist bullying. We got along well in the village. And I took those lessons to try and do something as lieutenant governor. I mobilized the people of Ontario. I established libraries in every First Nation of the province that wanted them. We put a million and a half books into the communities. I raised the money for summer reading camps. And we've been, I raised $7 million. And that, I gave it to Frontier College and came up with a model for them to use. And so we have a very successful model. We send 100 students up, university students up every year to Northern Ontario who work with the kids in the communities, helping them to learn to read and to love reading. I twin schools. I set up a, I requested the premier to establish, because they give a legacy gift to lieutenant governors and Aboriginal youth creative writing awards. And all these things have been going on now for oh, seven or eight years. But still the kids continue to die. I want to read, this will be the last thing I'll read. I want to read a poem written. Every year there's six students who produce the best short stories in poems. Short stories in poems. In Ontario. From the Métis, Inuit and First Nation communities. We get about 500 applications. Sort them out. I'll be going on Friday to hand out the new awards for this year. Last year, this is a poem which was written, a winner winning the winning poems was called Trapped by a 12 year old girl from Wonham and Lake. This is the same place that I've been talking about. There's not light. There's no sound. I need help. There's a place and time to be saved. But is it now? I need help. Help me now. I'm stuck in this place. I feel alone. I want to go somewhere else. It's so dark. It's so cold. Can you help me now? I'll be waiting here for you. I feel sad. I think I'm going insane. Can you help me now? I feel sick. I feel lonely. I need help right now. I've been yelling for help every day. Can you hear me now? I read that because 80% of the short stories and poems that come in of the 500 every year are like that. They're all messages of alien nation and marginalization and unhappiness. There is a big problem among the Native youth and nothing is going to happen unless governments take action because only governments can provide the proper level of funding so that you can have a decent level of education in those communities. But two other things are very important. The dialogue has to start between Native and non-Native people. I was at the Kuchichin conference this year which was on Native Affairs and there every speaker after speaker said a conversation must begin and the conversation can include young people, ordinary non-Natives going into Native communities, getting to know Native people it can include reading Native authors. There are lots of really good Native authors now Drew Hayden Taylor, Richard Wagamacy, Thomas King so that you can see reality, Native life from the inside the process of humanization has to occur. Nothing will happen at the level of governments unless people regard Native people in a different way and see them as people, if you cut them they will bleed and with rights like everyone else have until people begin to feel compassion for all these kids who continue to die year in and year out in the North. And I'll end by just a success story. I mentioned that good many in the South of the First Nation communities in the South are doing well they're not like the ones in the North. Chippewa's Arama I told you, one that I belong to was a rural slum but as the years went by the kids started going to the high school in Aurelia and got the normal standard of education that people in Ontario expect. The people were fortunate in that their children were not sent to residential schools but they went to elementary school to a local school on the reserve and so the kids began to do veteran school. The leaders of the community decided to try and turn around the community in terms of economic development. They established industrial parks. They built a big marina which employs a lot of people and then they competed with the other First Nations in the province to have the big casino built on their grounds and were successful. And now there are, there are more native people are employed in Rama on this casino than in any other place in Canada and with the money that people receive for rent of their land to the casino operators they were able to build good sports facilities which are used by the people in the surrounding communities. They were able to build a wonderful old age home and seniors residence and end of care facility. My mother passed away there at the age of 90 in March. Wonderful, wonderful care. People speaking her language. They're able and this is the point that I'm really happy about that as we speak right now there are 110 of the young people from that First Nation who are now attending university and who are four of them are doing PhDs, five of them are doing MAs. The others are scattered throughout the professions and this is every year. And that's because they had equal opportunity to the people in the surrounding communities. So thank you very much.